American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com
尼尔·盖曼(Neil Gaiman)
当代大师级幻想小说家，1960年生于英国。尼尔•盖曼是当代欧美文坛耀眼的新星，也是幻想文学的代名词。
《美国众神》是他的代表作，一出版就迅速横扫所有世界级幻想小说大奖，成为当之无愧的幻想文学经典。《纽约时报》评价它“用灵巧的手为我们 编织神话”。2017年，《美国众神》被改编为电视剧，引发全球收视热潮。
学生时代，盖曼曾组建朋克乐队，梦想成为摇滚明星，但并未想过成为作家。1989年，他以漫画《睡魔》开始了创作之路。其后，他的创作逐渐涵盖了小说、漫画、诗歌、剧本等多个领域。因其作品的独特风格和想象力，《迈阿密新时报》认为他已经成为“文学界的摇滚巨星”；惊悚小说大师斯蒂芬•金则认为他“创作力之丰沃与作品水准之高，既神奇又吓人”。